Going Meta on the Meta-Crisis

22 Meta-Moves for the Age of Doom and Bloom

“What stops humanity living in a world of justice and abundance is the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves” (Zak Stein)

We find ourselves in a global meta-crisis: a crisis in our ability to conceive, understand, and act on the fact that there is a crisis.

As Zak Stein explains, the metacrisis is a “generalised educational crisis in which, despite all the concrete problems faced by society, the most pressing problems are actually “in our heads” (i.e., in our minds and souls, we are in a crisis of the psyche).”.

He further divides the metacrisis into four interrelated crises:

• Sense-making crisis (what is the case?): Confusion at the level of understanding the nature of the world.
• Capability crisis (how can it be done?): Incapacity at the level of operating on the world intelligently. In all social positions and domains of work, individuals are increasingly unable to engage in problem- solving to the degree needed for continued social integration.
• Legitimacy crisis (who should do it?): Incoherence at the level of cultural agreements. Political and bureaucratic forms of power are failing to provide sufficiently convincing rationale and justification for trust in their continued authority.
• Meaning crisis (why do it?): Inauthenticity at the level of personal experience. Individuals from all walks of life are questioning the purpose of their existence, the goodness of the world, and the value of ethics, beauty, and truth.

Meta means “beyond”. So when we “go meta”, or make a “meta-move”, we take our current paradigm and find a new one that transcends and includes it. This is precisely what Einstein was getting at when he said we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

When we go meta, our thinking evolves to a higher level of complexity. We arrive at “both-and” viewpoints, instead of “either-or”. Not ecological or cultural crisis, but both ecological and cultural crisis.

To address the meta-crisis we need to make new meta-moves in various dimensions of our life. This post explores various practical ways we can do that, allowing us to overcome the underlying meta-crisis: that our psychology, society and politics are pretty awful at problem-solving and paradigm-shifting — i.e. at understanding and navigating crisis — keeping us locked into the problems and paradigms of the steadily collapsing old-world-system.

While this territory can sometimes feel overly abstract, do not doubt its potency for overturning your worldview and thrusting you into new realms of understanding. Psychological development progresses into greater complexity by synthesising clashing perspectives. And it’s by holding the most perspectives — or meta-perspectives! — that we can begin to see how to coordinate and navigate the outrageous complexity of modern society.

So without further ado, let’s get to it:

1. We need to think about how we think, how others think, how we perceive ourselves, and how others perceive themselves — that’s meta-cognition. And it’s central to good philosophy. Old dog Socrates was meta to the bone — he was proclaimed the “wisest of the Greeks” for the simple act of declaring his own ignorance. But this insight made the radical difference between him, grandfather of Western philosophy, and the regular citizen (who was ignorant of their ignorance!). In a strange paradox, making a meta-move allowed him to transcend and include his own ignorance, making him not-ignorant in an utterly transformative way.
2. We can learn how to learn — really, really well — meta-learning. A skill to learn all skills. Not bad.
3. We need to have conversations about conversations — meta-conversations.
4. We might engage in meta-questioning — asking: which questions we should be asking, and seeking answers to?
5. Another way of understanding the meta-crisis is that the global crisis is not reducible to any one way of seeing or explaining it. Every lens we use to understand the global crisis (e.g. ecological crisis, political crisis, economic crisis) is partial and limited. So, we need to be able to hold perspectives about our perspectives, and other people’s — these are meta-perspectives. They enable us to assess which perspectives work and which don’t, and to arrive at the criteria for an perspectives to “work”. Once we admit that everyone is always operating from some perspective, ideology or worldview, the need for meta-perspectives becomes obvious. Only by holding meta-perspectives can we make sense of and compare multiple differing perspectives. Dig? “Going meta” allows you to hold multiple perspectives and productively synthesise them, upgrading your ability to navigate and flourish in the collapsing-blossoming world-system. This enables us to have solidarity with all people, and to empathise with them from their perspective. Compassion and mutual understanding increase. Even better, meta-perspectives makes our own perspectives conscious and critique-able, not unconscious and therefore unquestioned. This enables humour, self-irony and detachment; we are less dogmatic and more open to alternative viewpoints. Essential meta-crisis skill.
6. We can gain awareness of our awareness — meta-awareness or the “witness attitude”. Heidegger called this the “authentic mode” — when we become less concerned with how and what things are than with the glaring, mystical, naked fact that they are at all. This is the start of one’s existential journey, known as the ontological turn. With practice, meta-awareness leads to recognition of our “true nature”, non-dual awareness.
7. And we can go further than that — to see a kind of meta-nonduality: the non-duality between duality and non-duality. This isn’t trivial, but profoundly liberating. Bear with me. Seeing the absence of any difference (duality) between duality and nonduality delivers us from the attitude of ascetic escapism, where spirituality becomes a retreat from the world in order to escape the illusion of duality and attain to the truth of nonduality. But, once we realise that nonduality is nothing to be “found”, separate from the everyday world, once we grok the “emptiness of emptiness”, we undergo a return to the world… we see that nirvana is no more real than samsara, and indeed the two cannot be considered separate. The last duality collapses into divine emptiness; total freedom. The enlightened sage is ultimately no different from the meditation beginner falling asleep on her mat. This is known as the “fourth turning” of Buddhism, originating in the Madhyamika school of Tibet. Summarised by Ken Wilber: It was as if the secrets of the world of Form — too long denied, repressed, negatively judged, blamed for all sin and illusion, and ultimately rejected — actually began to give up their divine secrets when viewed as being a manifestation or ornament of Spirit itself. The ultimately wildly Free nature of Emptiness was conjoined with the radically luminous and Full nature of Form (where Emptiness is not something different than Form, but the actual Emptiness of all Form) to divulge an infinite Wholeness of self-existing, self-aware, self-liberating, radiant Reality of What there is and All there is.” Not bad. Let’s keep going.
8. We can investigate our theories about, and thus our psychological understanding of, psychology itself— meta-psychology (deriving from Freud). An essential inquiry for developing our understanding our what it means to be human. We can learn the art of seeing image as image — realise that we inhabit and respond to a world of our own imaginations. We live by metaphors. This is a profoundly re-enchanting realisation; it helps us realise our fundamental participation in the co-creation of reality, the dependent nature of all things (which Buddhists call emptiness). We reclaim our freedom as the artists and poets of the cosmos.
9. We need post-postmodernism in order to progress beyond an era of postmodern deconstruction which has lead to rampant cynicism and nihilism (think post-truth / alternative facts). This reconstruction is the aim of metamodernism, a cultural attitude which oscillates between modernism and postmodernism, creating a rich dialectic and synthesising the best of the two. The term Metamodernism is also used to describe our emerging historical period (Pre-Modern, Modern, Postmodern, Metamodern) — a time of great complexity, ambiguity and potential.
10. “Political metamodernism”, as espoused by Hanzi Freinacht in his books The Listening Society and Nordic Ideology, is, in one sense, a program to construct a meta-politics: an attempt to politicise the myriad factors that influence the quality, efficiency, intelligence, reliability, of politics itself. This would be made possible by the 6 forms of metamodern politics.
11. We need new stories about our stories — meta-narratives, which offer a grand synthesis of other narratives. Postmodernism abhors meta narratives and attempted to kill them all, but meta-modernism revives them as continually updatable proto-synthesis, which, when held with irony and detachment, allows us to idealistically strive towards collective freedom and equality. This is what David Foster Wallace was talking about in his legendary This is Water address — how do you help a fish see the water it’s swimming in?
12. Theories about theories — meta-theories. Our everyday lives are lived expressions of our deep theories about reality — our ontology (what is real?), aesthetics or axiology (what is beautiful?), ideology (what is good and just?) and identity (what am I?). Meta-theories transform the theories that define our existence; we can change human nature by the very act of understanding it.
13. We can begin to play with a profoundly life-enriching, post-postmodern (or meta-modern) revival of metaphysics.
14. A society that is self-aware of its own societal narratives, norms, fictions, allowing it to consciously self-program (instead of habitually, unconsciously — and destructively — self-programming, as is currently the case) would be a metamodern society that practices a politics of theory. That paves the way for an emergent, co-created culture that is continually redesigning itself towards higher collective flourishing, equality, and freedom.
15. We need democratic improvement of our democracy — meta-democracy or democratisation politics. The global climate crisis is, in part, a crisis of democracy, so look no further for solutions that generate solutions.
16. Scientific/empirical improvement of scientific best practices — metascience, advocated for by Hanzi Freinacht in Nordic Ideology as “empirical politics”.
17. Before coming up with a plan or strategy, it makes sense to come up with a meta-strategy — a strategy for hatching great strategies.
18. We may embrace meta-meaning — finding meaning in our ability to create-and-discover meaning. Modernism says we discover meaning “out there” in the world, leading us to doggedly pursue absolute ideals and to neglect our subjective experience. Postmodernism says we create all meaning ourselves — so it’s all imaginary, subjective, worthless — and we slip into nihilism. Create-and-discover is a new relationship to meaning, a dance in the liminal space (not self, not world, but a magical blend) where we are fully participating in the mystery of life and cosmos, continually creating and discovering meaning — as well as beauty, freedom, and divinity.
19. A central element of existential-spiritual development is to practise practising. Meta-practice — becoming attuned to our relationship to the practice in any moment or practice session (am I striving too much? by what criteria am I judging this practice session?), can greatly enhance our meditative skill. With practice, we can detach from self-critical judgements and learn what “good practice” feels like.
20. Meta-spirituality. My boy Jules has got this covered.
21. Artificial intelligence is learning to code its own code — artificial meta-cognition which, if it gets going, will likely result in an intelligence explosion — no doubt one of the craziest and most incomprehensible events that could possibly occur in the known universe. Buckle up.
22. In 1931, metamathematics blew the whole discipline of mathematics apart from the inside — as Kurt Gödel began using self-referential mathematical statements (i.e. meta-statements) to create logical contradictions, proving the that there will always be statements outside of any formal (logical-mathematical) system that cannot be proven within it. This might sound trivial, but it has profound implications for computer science and human cognition — Douglas Hofstadter went as far as to say that consciousness itself arises from the way the brain “abstracts and categorises stimuli into “symbols”, or groups of neurons which respond to concepts, in what is effectively also a formal system, eventually giving rise to symbols modelling the concept of the very entity doing the perception”.
23. (Human) collective intelligences applied to the task of researching how they can develop greater collective intelligence — we’re working on it.